This is the second in a series of dialogues with philosophers on violence for The Stone. This conversation is with George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and author, editor, co-editor of many books, including “Look, a White!” — Brad Evans

Brad Evans: In response to a series of troubling verbal attacks you recently received following your essay in The Stone in December, “Dear White America,” the American Philosophical Association put out a strongly worded statement criticizing the bullying and harassment of academics in the public realm. But beyond this, shouldn’t we address the broader human realities of such hateful speech, and in particular, how this sort of discursive violence directly impacts the body of the person attacked?

George Yancy: Your point about discursive violence is an important one. Immediately after the publication of “Dear White America,” I began to receive vile and vitriolic white racist comments sent to my university email address, and verbal messages sent to my answering machine. I even received snail mail that was filled with hatred. Imagine the time put into actually sitting down and writing a letter filled with so much hate and then sending it snail mail, especially in our world of the Internet.

The alarming reality is that the response to “Dear White America” revealed just how much racism continues to exist in our so-called post-racial America. The comments were not about pointing out fallacies in my position, but were designed to violate, to leave me psychologically broken and physically distraught.

Words do things, especially words like “nigger,” or being called an animal that should go back to Africa or being told that I should be “beheaded ISIS style.” One white supremacist message sent to me ended with “Be Prepared.” Another began with “Dear Nigger Professor.”

The brutality and repetitiveness of this discursive violence has a way of inflicting injury. Given the history of the term “nigger,” it strikes with the long, hate-filled context of violence out of which that term grew. This points to the non-spectacular expression of violence. The lynching of black people was designed to be a spectacle, to draw white mobs. In this case, the black body was publicly violated. It was a public and communal form of bloodlust. There are many other forms of violence that are far more subtle, non-spectacular, but yet painful and dehumanizing. So, when I was called a “nigger,” I was subject to that. I felt violated, injured; a part of me felt broken.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

I’m not their mother. And I’m not their girlfriend either.

I’m their university professor. At times I encounter students, both male and female, who don’t quite grasp this, and I consequently find myself in a whole host of awkward situations, trying to subtly remind them that I’m neither going to make their bed nor go to bed with them.

The problem is that my students lack the cultural scripts to know how to deal with our teacher-student relationship. In 1925, Sigmund Freud coined the idea of the “Madonna-whore complex,” according to which men are able to see women only as their saintly mothers or their sexual playthings. Whatever one thinks of Freud, we can all recognize some truth to this insight.

De Beauvoir argued that women crave men’s authority to protect them from their own liberty. Is it still true?

If I were to serve as their mother, I’d have only compassion and unconditional acceptance to offer, not intellectual lessons. And being their sexual plaything isn’t an option either; playthings aren’t generally accorded the kind of respect needed for effective teaching and learning, not to mention the respect I deserve after more than a decade of postsecondary education.

My male colleagues don’t have these problems. There’s no shortage of roles they can avail themselves of in trying to reach their students.

Male professors’ strategies for reaching their male students harken back to Plato. In his “Symposium,” Read more…

FRANK BRUNI: It’s that time of year, Ross: Conservatives grieve the death of Christmas, liberals rue the commercialization of all holidays and the director David O. Russell and the megastars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper storm America’s multiplexes with a movie timed for awards-season glory. Three years ago it was “Silver Linings Playbook.” Two years ago, “American Hustle.”

This year they seek to sweep up Oscar nominations with a mop — literally. And you and I bring our readers tidings of “Joy.”

ROSS DOUTHAT: A Merry Christmas movie season to you as well, Frank! So what did you make of the latest Russell-Lawrence-Cooper (though mainly Russell and Lawrence, this time) paean to eccentric Northeastern white ethnics?

BRUNI: “Joy” struck me as something of a dare that Russell issued to himself: Are my skills so potent and my leading lady’s charms so prodigious that the two of us can win audiences over with a two-hours-plus biopic about a better way to clean the kitchen floor?

Of course “Joy” isn’t really about that. In telling the tale, loosely rooted in real events, of Joy Mangano, who invented the self-wringing Miracle Mop, it means to accomplish a whole lot else. It’s a parable of pluck. It’s a meditation on the overburdened, underappreciated roles that so many women have played in their families and the quickness with which the men around them belittled their dreams.

DOUTHAT: It’s a movie that reminded me in certain ways of the Diane Keaton vehicle “Baby Boom” — one of the first grown-up movies I remember seeing in the theaters, way back in 1987, which also gave us the mom-as-entrepreneur, peddling a product (baby food then, the self-wringing mop now) that promises the partial relief of the maternal estate.

BRUNI: It’s also an oddly paced mess. In its frenetic first act, it’s constantly missing its screwball-comedy marks. But I think its relationship to the current political moment is fascinating.

Although it’s set more than a quarter century ago, around the birth of the QVC cable TV channel (where Cooper’s character works), its preoccupations are entirely of-the-moment: the way the economic deck is stacked against the little guy (or gal); the frequently false promise of upward mobility; the perfidies of unchallenged, unchecked corporations. Russell is betting that Joy, as inhabited by Lawrence, will be a proxy for many frustrated Americans.

DOUTHAT: Yes, “Joy” does seem intended to resonate with our own era’s mix of blue-collar anxiety and “can women have it all?” agita among the well-to-do. And that’s another parallel to “Baby Boom,” which belongs with “9 to 5” and “Working Girl” in the ’80s-era museum case of “women: now they’re in WORKPLACE!” comedies.

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JoyCredit Twentieth Century Fox

But where “Baby Boom” stayed low and broad in its humor and satire, “Joy” is a more ambitious and bizarre — this is David O. Russell, after all. The characters talk in speeches; the storytelling is rich with artifice; there are flashbacks and dream sequences and narration from beyond the grave. A lot of this doesn’t really work. But I kind of loved it, flaws and all.

And at the very least it’s worth seeing, as you say, because Jennifer Lawrence is a Movie Star, and that holds true even when the movie around her threatens to become a Mess.

Also, better Russell’s mess than J.J. Abrams’s machine-like efficiency. Or maybe you liked “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” more than I did?

BRUNI: It’s funny that you use the word “machine” for the latest “Star Wars,” because it did seem to me a carefully rigged, painstakingly wired delivery system for the highest dose imaginable of pharmaceutical-grade nostalgia. I experienced it as a pastiche of all of the most beloved themes, sequences, plot lines and visual tropes that appeared in one or more of the first three “Star Wars” movies.

DOUTHAT: I’ve already subjected my poor readers to one over-long rant about “The Force Awakens,” but I think you’ve captured the key difference between the new movie and the originals.

Lucas’s trilogy was a pastiche of the entirety of cinematic history: Everything from Flash Gordon to Akira Kurosawa to Leni Riefenstahl to “Casablanca” found its way into those movies, and it was the combination that made everything old seem new, strange and alive.

But “The Force Awakens” is, as you say, just a pastiche of … the original trilogy. And even that’s being a little kind, since it borrows only a couple of elements from “Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” and mostly hews so closely to the 1977 “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” script that it’s almost just a straight remake or reboot.

Where Lucas gave us all of cinematic history in a galaxy far, far away, in other words, Abrams has just given us a handsome, well-acted George Lucas fan film.

BRUNI: As I watched it, I was struck by how many myths — whether they come from the ancient Greeks, William Shakespeare or George Lucas — revolve around the estrangement of fathers and sons. Where would literature, film and all of storytelling be without daddy issues? (For that matter, where would politics and the modern presidency be without them?)

But “The Force Awakens” never made clear to me precisely what drove Han Solo’s and Princess Leia’s child away and why he despises Han in particular so much. Han and Leia do come across as distracted, overcommitted parents, what with the fate of the galaxy constantly on the line and in their hands. Were they a two-career, two-planet couple who outsourced too much of the child rearing to Chewbacca?

Whatever the movie’s accomplishments and limitations, it’s a monster hit on a scale beyond even the most optimistic predictions, and the vacation that it offers Americans from a period of gloom, fear and campaign-trail grotesqueness has to be one reason. Of late there haven’t been many places where a baffled voter can escape the inexcusable tirades and inexplicable tresses of Donald Trump. The distant cosmos inhabited by R2-D2 and C-3P0 is one of them.

DOUTHAT: I don’t object to people enjoying a Lucas fan film, or escaping into it! (Although you may be underestimating how much of Trump’s reality-TV showboating is likewise a form of escapism for his fans, a different way of escaping the Mos Eisley cantina of politics-as-usual.) But I do think it’s a little strange how fully movie critics embraced the hype, especially just a month after the “Hunger Games” saga — a genre pastiche whose originality puts Abrams’s flick to shame — wrapped up to more indifferent or dutiful reviews. Nostalgia is the real Force, it turns out.

Even with all those plaudits, though, it seems safe to say that “Star Wars” won’t dominate awards season. So what will? Which of the fall’s prestige offerings struck you as the best this season had to offer?

BRUNI: Well, I think “Spotlight” is a serious contender for the best picture Oscar — and rightly so.

Your relationship to the Catholic Church is much different from mine, so I’m very curious for your take on that movie. What most impressed and pleased me about it — and I mentioned this in a column last month — is its depiction of the forces in American society that colluded to allow so many instances of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and such an infuriating lag before any adequate, just response to it. There was a reluctance to think ill of “men of God,” to take on a powerful religious institution, to peer into it. “Spotlight” nails that.

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SpotlightCredit Kerry Hayes/Open Road Films

DOUTHAT: I’ll play against my reactionary-Catholic type, Frank, and say that in general I’ve been impressed with Hollywood’s treatments of the sex abuse scandal. The movie industry is not exactly known for its fondness for my church (at least these days; the Hays Code era was a different matter), but where Catholicism’s greatest recent shame is concerned it’s mostly resisted the impulse to just go all in for stereotypes and sensationalism and anti-papist tropes.

I have in mind movies like “Doubt” and the slightly-more-obscure “Calvary,” which you touted in an earlier go-round. The former is an evenhanded examination of the scandal’s tangled roots, the latter a look — through the eyes of a genuinely heroic priest — at the spiritual devastation wrought by the crisis and its aftermath. And “Spotlight” fits neatly in between them: It’s harsher on the institutional church than either, but that’s as it should be, since it deals with the cover-up and its exposure, and the cover-up is the most damnable part of the scandal. There will always be abusive priests, as there will always be abusers in any position of authority, but the bishops who protected predators instead of kids are the ones most in need of millstones.

I thought the movie was impressive, if maybe just a touch too pious about its journalistic heroes, and I had only modest quibbles with its portrayal of the scandal itself.

BRUNI: I was also deeply moved by “Room,” whose lead, Brie Larson, is pretty much guaranteed a best actress nomination, while a best supporting actor nod could well go to her co-star, Jacob Tremblay, who’s only 9 years old.

DOUTHAT: Yes, precisely because “Spotlight” didn’t stoop to sensationalism, it also didn’t get under my skin in anything remotely like the way “Room” did.

Indeed I’m a little hesitant in even passing judgment on “Room,” because my reaction was so visceral, and so hard to separate emotionally from my current father-of-young-children state in life. I literally writhed and shuddered in my seat during the tensest moments, and the waterworks opened easily thereafter. Was that reaction a testament to the movie’s craft, its great performances (Larson in particular), or just a case of its primal fairy-tale conceit exploiting my rubbed-raw emotional state?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because exploitation is itself a form of craft.

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RoomCredit George Kraychyk/A24 Film

BRUNI: It haunts me, and it haunts me because of something that comes through even more clearly in this screen version than in the novel on which it’s based. “Room” is about the brutal conundrums of parenting.

On its harrowing, attention-getting surface, it’s the story of a woman who’s a sexual prisoner and has given birth to, and reared, her son in the backyard shed to which she’s been confined for over five years.

But it’s really about one of any and every parent’s most profound challenges: to paint a child’s world, no matter how small and grim, in colors of hope and wonder, so that it’s endurable. It’s also about one of any and every parent’s trickiest decisions: how much truth to let in.

And there’s a surprising, gut-punching moment in the movie’s last half-hour when you realize that it has yet one more big theme up its sleeve, which is the impossibility of knowing, in full honesty, which decisions you’ve made solely for your child and which you’ve made in significant measure for yourself.

DOUTHAT: It would probably have a claim on my best picture vote if I had one, but I sometimes felt more like its hostage than its fan.

BRUNI: You’re not the first person who’s told me that “Room” was hard to watch, almost traumatic, and that’s fascinating because it’s not explicit at all. There’s no gore. The sexual violence isn’t directly shown. That it nonetheless feels as raw to viewers as it does is, I think, a testament to the skill with which it’s been made.

And I was grateful for it, because I saw it right after “Suffragette,” which was so noble but so ordinary, and “Our Brand Is Crisis,” which was close to unwatchable, despite Sandra Bullock’s and Billy Bob Thornton’s best efforts. We wait all year for the promised cinematic bounty of November and December, and the stocking often has as many lumps of coal as it does candy canes.

DOUTHAT: And we haven’t even managed to assign some pretty big movies (ahem, Mr. Tarantino) to the “naughty” or the “nice” list. But we’ll have time for that when reconvene for the Oscars; until then, fellow Moviegoer, a very happy New Year.

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Those of us in favor of stronger laws to abate gun violence mostly support our cause by arguing against the claims of the gun lobby (roughly, the N.R.A. and gun manufacturers). It should by now be obvious that this is a waste of time. The case for action is overwhelming, but there’s no chance of convincing the entrenched minority who are so personally (or financially) invested in gun ownership. Legislative efforts have failed because the opposition is more deeply committed — more energized, more organized, more persistent.

My purpose here is not to continue arguing with the gun lobby or even to discuss the precise form that new gun legislation should take. Instead, I’m interested in understanding the intensity gap and how we might overcome it. Only when there’s a sustained passion against gun violence will there be a meaningful chance of effective action.

Our permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism, an evil that, in other contexts, most gun-control advocates see as a fundamental threat to American society.

It might seem that fear of gun violence is the great motivator. Pro-gun advocates see guns as our best defense against armed criminals. Anti-gun advocates see the wide availability of guns as a greater threat than criminal violence. The issue seems to come down to what you fear more: criminals or guns.

But the passion of the gun lobby goes much deeper than fear of criminals. As Firmin DeBrabander’s excellent book, “Do Guns Make Us Free?” demonstrates, the basic motivation of the pro-gun movement is freedom from government interference. They talk about guns for self-defense, but their core concern is their constitutional right to bear arms, which they see as the foundation of American freedom. The right to own a gun is, as the N.R.A. website puts it, “the right that protects all other rights.” Their galvanizing passion is a hatred of tyranny. Like many other powerful political movements, the gun lobby is driven by hatred of a fundamental evil that it sees as a threat to our way of life — an existential threat — quite apart from any specific local or occasional dangers.

The intensity gap exists because opponents of gun violence have no corresponding deep motivation. We cite suicide rates, urban violence, and, especially, mass shootings as horrors requiring more effective gun laws. But few of us actually see guns as existential threats to fundamental American values. In this, however, we are mistaken. Our permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism, an evil that, in other contexts, most gun-control advocates see as a fundamental threat to American society. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In 2015, I conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. My aim was to engage, in this very public space, with the often unnamed elephant in the room.

These discussions helped me, and I hope many of our readers, to better understand how race continues to function in painful ways within our country. That was one part of a gift that I wanted to give to readers of The Stone, the larger philosophical community, and the world.

The interviewees themselves — bell hooks, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Peter Singer, David H. Kim, Molefi Kete Asante among them — came from a variety of racial backgrounds, and their concerns and positions were even more diverse. But on the whole I came to see these interviews as linked by a common thread: They were messages to white America — because they often directly expressed the experience of those who live and have lived as people of color in a white-run world, and that is something no white person could ever truly know firsthand.

That is how I want to deliver my own message now.

•

Dear White America,

I have a weighty request. As you read this letter, I want you to listen with love, a sort of love that demands that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain and terror, as James Baldwin would say. Did you hear that? You may have missed it. I repeat: I want you to listen with love. Well, at least try.

We don’t talk much about the urgency of love these days, especially within the public sphere. Much of our discourse these days is about revenge, name calling, hate, and divisiveness. I have yet to hear it from our presidential hopefuls, or our political pundits. I don’t mean the Hollywood type of love, but the scary kind, the kind that risks not being reciprocated, the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. To make it a bit easier for you, I’ve decided to model, as best as I can, what I’m asking of you. Let me demonstrate the vulnerability that I wish you to show. As a child of Socrates, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, let me speak the truth, refuse to err on the side of caution.

This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don’t have to accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the last in this series of 2015 interviews with philosophers on race. This week’s conversation is with the scholar, critic and public intellectual bell hooks, who is currently the distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian studies at Berea College. She is the author of many books, including “Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice” — George Yancy

George Yancy: Over the years you have used the expression “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the power structure underlying the social order. Why tie those terms together as opposed to stressing any one of them in isolation?

bell hooks: We can’t begin to understand the nature of domination if we don’t understand how these systems connect with one another. Significantly, this phrase has always moved me because it doesn’t value one system over another. For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

G.Y.: I’ve heard you speak many times and I noticed that you do so with a very keen sense of humor. What is the role of humor in your work?

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bell hooksCredit

b.h.: We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail. Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community. For example, I love to be in conversation with Cornel West. We always go high and we go low, and we always bring the joyful humor in. The last talk he and I gave together, many people were upset because we were silly together. But I consider it a high holy calling that we can be humorous together. How many times do we see an African-American man and an African-American woman talking together, critiquing one another, and yet having delicious, humorous delight? It’s a miracle.

G.Y.: What is your view of the feminist movement today, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?Read more…

This interview, the latest in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning feminism. My interviewee is Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School. She is the author of “Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis.” – Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting: You’ve recently written: “As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world — more egalitarian — just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that . . . our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.” Could you explain what you have in mind?

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Nancy FraserCredit

Nancy Fraser: My feminism emerged from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long as this structure remains intact.

Mainstream feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” — in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class.

G.G.: Why can’t responding to feminist concerns be seen as just one major step in correcting the social and economic flaws of our capitalist society, not a fundamental transformation of the system?

N.F.: It certainly can be seen that way. But I am questioning whether today’s feminism is really advancing that process. As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!

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But that is not all. Mainstream feminism has adopted a thin, market-centered view of equality, which dovetails neatly with the prevailing neoliberal corporate view. So it tends to fall into line with an especially predatory, winner-take-all form of capitalism that is fattening investors by cannibalizing the living standards of everyone else. Worse still, this feminism is supplying an alibi for these predations. Increasingly, it is liberal feminist thinking that supplies the charisma, the aura of emancipation, on which neoliberalism draws to legitimate its vast upward redistribution of wealth.Read more…

This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy

George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?

David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency. I think these sensibilities are due in large part to my experience of growing up bicultural, raced, and gendered in the U.S., a country that has never really faced up to its exclusionary and often violent anti-Asian practices. In fact, I am sometimes amazed that I have left so many tense racialized encounters with both my life and all my teeth. In other contexts, life and limb were not at issue, but I did not emerge with my self-respect intact.

These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color.

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David Haekwon KimCredit Ronald Sundstrom

It’s a challenge to convey this sort of lived experience, and this, too, has shaped my philosophical identity. So little has been said in philosophy and public life about the situation of Asian-Americans that we don’t have much in the way of common understandings that are accurate and illuminating. Making matters worse is that the void is filled by many misleading notions about race in general, which includes such notions like our country being beyond race, that critiquing white privilege is hating whites, that any race talk is racist, etc.

There is also problematic discourse about Asian-Americans in particular, like the Model Minority myth. This popular notion posits Asian-Americans as being successful along many indices of assimilation and socioeconomic well-being and thus a model for other non-whites. Its veracity aside, its actual political function is to excuse anti-black and anti-Latino racism and prevent interracial solidarity. In any case, I believe the invisibility of Asian-Americans in our culture has been so deep and enduring that Asian-Americans themselves are often ambivalent about how they would like to see themselves portrayed and perhaps even uncomfortable about being portrayed at all. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the latest in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Paul Gilroy, who is a professor of American and English literature at King’s College London in Britain. He has previously taught at the London School of Economics, Yale, and Goldsmiths College. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: In a review of the 2013 movie “12 Years a Slave,” you wrote that neoliberalism — the unquestioning faith in free market values taken to ideological extremes — essentially ignores the existence of systemic racism, and presents it as “anachronistic.” This worldview, which so many of us in the West confront in society, you wrote, “decrees that racism no longer presents a significant obstacle either to individual success or to collective self-realization.” This made me think of, among other things, the killing in April of Walter Scott, a black man who was shot in the back eight times by a white police officer in Charleston, S.C. Obviously, there is nothing anachronistic about American racism. It is alive and well. From your perspective in Britain, how do you understand events like the Scott killing?

Paul Gilroy: I don’t come to the United States very often but I happened to be visiting when Walter Scott was shot by another trigger-happy police officer. I was angry and upset. I hope I don’t need to emphasize that I am a firm supporter of the movement that has arisen in response to this sequence of killings exposed by the ubiquity of the camera phone and the communicative resources of social media. Britain isn’t a gun-loving or -toting nation. Racism in our country doesn’t operate on the same scale as the racial organization of law and sovereign power in the United States, but our recent history also includes a long list of black people who’ve lost their lives following contact with the forces of law and order. Similarly, our police and their various private proxies have never been held to account for those deaths, so this is very familiar ground. Police in many polities can kill with impunity, and racial hierarchy augments their essentially permissive relationship with the law. The officer in this case was charged with murder. We will have to see whether he is found guilty. That would be a very rare outcome indeed.

Of course, to say that neoliberalism presents racism as anachronistic was not to say that racism is anachronistic. Confronting racism is a timely, urgent matter. The casual killing of black people appears to be a pursuit that originated in an earlier phase of American history. In his epochal analysis of historical and cultural process, the prolific Welsh novelist and academic Raymond Williams drew an important distinction in the way that social and cultural formations develop. Drawing upon him, we can say that we live with neoliberalism but it might not yet be fully dominant. There is certainly worse to come. Neoliberalism could still be emergent, while what appears to be the casual habit of murdering people who come into contact with the police might belong to its prehistory and could be considered either dominant or residual, depending on your point of view. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Now that same-sex couples can marry in all 50 states, controversies are erupting over clerks who don’t want to issue same-sex marriage licenses, bakers who don’t want to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, photographers who don’t want to take our pictures and so on.

“It’s simple,” one friend opined, echoing a common refrain. “If you own a business that’s open to the public, then you must serve all comers.”

I very much hope he’s wrong.

This friend is a psychotherapist in private practice, and so I asked whether he should be allowed to decline a client whom he deemed not a good fit. He acknowledged that he might “recommend” a different therapist but never stated whether he should be allowed to refuse outright. Instead, he pulled out a familiar trump card: “Well, should a racist restaurant owner be allowed to refuse service to blacks?”

This response is too quick. Although the race analogy can be illuminating, as I’ve argued before, it can also be a lazy way of avoiding hard questions. Read more…